Great question, Gail

I am wrestling with that question right now with my own school board.
There are many aspects to the relevance of PO to our public schools systems.
Board admin certainly needs to be well aware, since they are responsible for long-term planning of all aspects, including school location, design, energy efficiency, etc.
They are also responsible for busing and teacher placement.

On the curriculum front (which is the focus of your question), we need to start with senior high and work down, but not too far down.
I'm an elementary teacher (Grade 7/8, 11-14 yr olds) and I was recently asked to present to Grade 8 kids as part of an enrichment activity.
I declined.

Until parents and Board administration are themselves well aware of PO, any teacher is asking for trouble by presenting the PO 'theory' to students.
That risk increases inversely to the age of the students, I would think.
This is a dark and complex issue, and younger children should not be burdened with it until it's absolutely necessary.

Teachers should work within their federation/professional association first, then with Board admin, then parents, and last in directing PO curriculum to students, starting in the senior grades.

Other views are welcome....

- Rick in Ontario

An interesting point X made in today's Drumbeat:

If it were not for the internet, how many could deduce Peak Oil from direct experience on their own?

Yes, peak oil should be taught. Having personal experience of the devastation and despair that occurs when one is suckered by their happy-happy-joy-joy version of the future and then it turns out to be totally bogus, kids are entitled to a realistic vision of what the future holds, not shiny-happy-people pipe dreams.

My son is 22. He doesn't get it yet. Still thinks going to college is the magic panacea. I am not looking forward to his pain. But I will be here for him when the day comes.

Should the peak oil story be taught in schools?

Many schools have a hard time teaching evolution without parents going ape. Peak oil? AGW!? Some school systems can't even pay for their revisionist history text books.

Peak oil is a home schooling thing.

Yes, let's give them a break and tell 'em what we know. There's not much time. In a few years we may be calling it "history". I work with several young city planners that don't have a clue. What does that say? My generation is a write-off. Let's hope for the next one.

If the world will be changing, what should we be saying to our children about it?

We should be teaching our children to have less children when they grow up.

People won't change until its too late in the US so I spred the word about peak oil to anyone that will listen. And I can tell not many people want to listen about peak oil. So what do you do?

I went to a school last Friday and spoke with fifteen kids about peak oil and food security. They were all younger than high school age -- not your typical school but options exist for some parents.

Consider having few or no children.

I teach advanced high school chemistry classes -- mostly juniors & seniors -- & I talk about peak oil & climate change quite often. The response is sort of weird -- they're smart kids & most of them seem to get it (on an intellectual/scientific level, at least) that big changes are coming. But the funny thing is that they don't seem to process it more than that; they don't seem to be able to see that it actually applies to them & not just to some abstract future. i.e. They go on making 'normal' plans for a 'business as usual' future like I never said anything. They tell me about their future careers etc in a world that will never exist. I don't have the heart to keep pressing them on it at that point & I just nod & say good luck & write their recommendation letters to college. They just seem so excited & hopeful for the same lives (only better) that their upper-middle class parents are currently enjoying. Sigh. Nobody WANTS to get it, so they don't. It's too scary for them.

So here's what I do: I still feel it's necessary to tell them the truth about the energy/economic/environmental prdicaments, & I keep them updated on a regular basis. But what seems to work the best along with that is to intersperse it with lots of talk about what I'm doing about it personally: gardening, low-tech replacements for fossil-fuel-dependent gizmos, learning ecology, trying to build community bonds, planting fruit & nut trees, raising chickens & sheep, trying to live Leopold's Land Ethic, etc. etc. They seem to like that & connect with it on a more personal level than the peak oil or climate data.

So who knows? It's gonna be a kick in the gut for everyone when the ship starts to go down. I feel that the best I can do is plant some seeds that might grow into something good. It makes me feel better, if nothing else.

Is it even possible to teach peak oil in school without a parent, such as myself, coming unglued when it includes the kind of rampant speculation favored by its advocates?

Someone wants to teach that peak oil is a maximum production rate, at some point in time? I could survive that. But the instant someones personal rapture scenario is attached to it? I'll be in the principles office as fast as I was when someone demanded a numerical answer to an equation which tried to use zero as a denominator.

If those who write curriculum don't understand how ridiculous that looks, what are they going to do when presenting the basics of the rate of conversion from resource to reserves, discovery process modeling, or as has been demonstrated in this very forum, knowing how to count what OIL actually is?

It would be nice if children were taught to be citizens, as well as fact regurgitators. However with the timetable as crowded as it is, it would require a realisation in the education community that they have been focusing on the wrong things.

If taught, it should be in the context of the wider 'limits to growth' understanding of our global systems - touching on areas such as climate change, peak oil, food, water, fiat currencies, demographics, etc.

Before that however, the adults would have to understand and come up with some workable answers themselves. So you'd have to start by teaching the adults about the world.

My children's teachers are the same ones I had. They stopped thinking a long time ago. I say skip them and move on to something kids might pay attention to. Make it a video game. My kids know how to fish to earn weapons on RuneScape and how to conduct a war on Mars. This subject could be presented as another alternative world in which to earn points.

We should be teaching our children the truth! The easy to get oil is gone, new sources involve increasing costs and complications. The use of any fossil fuel resource involves, environmental, social, and health consequences. There are alternative sources, and the future will be determined in a large part by our energy use decisions.

As a high school teacher, I am _glad_ I am in a position to share the story of peak oil. If anyone wants to accuse me of being alarmist, I point them to World Energy Outlook 2008, the UK government reports on peak oil, the Hirsch report, and US Department of Defense reports on Peak Oil.

My students are generally receptive about the message. I disagree with the other poster's point that they should give up their dreams. You may have to modify your dreams a bit, but I still think an advanced degree is valuable. I think those whose message to our kids is "Your future is doomed" are ignorant, have tunnel vision, and grossly underestimate the capacity of young people to hardship.

As for the adults, I seem to recall someone who was offering a million or two dollars to spread the message. I can't seem to find the news on TOD anymore, so someone please help me out. Lets see if this guy's plan succeeds.

It would be difficult to decide what aspects of peak oil to discuss to students due to the array of views concerning the implications (especially in the near-term) of peak oil. On top the divergence of views that exists in even the most knowledgeable of circles it would take hours to properly disseminate all the interrelated pieces from thermodynamics to EROEI, limits to growth, complex systems theory, fractional reserve banking, etc. I personally believe Chris Martenson does a fantastic job by avoiding the gloom, and focusing on keeping the audience captivated enough to go out and research for themselves. People are naturally aversive to having another individual explain to them why anything bad is going to happen, much less the collapse of industrial civilization. In my own experience attempting to inform professors, peers, family, and friends I have not yet convinced a single person to prepare in the slightest. Although, I have gotten several to agree with the data, analysis, and conclusions. Its pretty intense double think from my viewpoint, but I don't blame them. I'm 23 years old, and have performed a 45 minute PowerPoint lecture on Peak Oil for seminar. Everyone in the class that I talked to gave a glowing review, but by interacting with them it was clear that the topic was immediately purged from their minds once the class ended that day. I've personally come to the conclusion that the longer time goes on (and thus the more imminent the consequences) the less interested unaware people become because preparing requires such a drastic change from their desired reality. They'd rather be a wrong voice in a group of wrong voices than a solo correct one.

It would be nice to get the message to adult opinion leaders. Paul Krugman keeps advocating reinflating the economy to full employment. I try to get him thinking about it by asking questions in his blog like "how much oil would the world economy then use, and what if the world can't pump that much oil at the moment?" For kids I'd really like to teach them to think for themselves. Maybe we should start with the words of David MacKay: numbers not adjectives, modelling not arm-waving. Also we need to let them know that many reasonable sounding people have hidden motives and are less than honest: the engines of disinformation run on both sides of any argument that has policy implications.

Parents should tell their own kids for sure while learning together the kind of skills that will be needed.
But it's way too soon to try to get schools to teach it -- the conversation is still too young.
Besides the financial implosion that we are just at the start of will mask most of what we all believe to be true.
Last, colleges and universities are going to shut down in droves this decade. This is a consequence of just the end of growth. Contraction simply accelerates things somewhat. We already have glut of educated people that is only going to get (much) worse.
When there is a glut in any other sector the factories shut down until the glut disappears. We will see *a lot* of factories (schools) shut down in this decade -- perhaps as many as 3 out 5 by 2020 as kids choose not to go in debt and endowments and tax revenues disappear.

Our social science department is teaching a unit on economics to year 9s centred around peak oil and resource depletion. So we're teaching conventional basic economic theory in tandem with peak oil and looking at how scarcity effects price, and so on down the line. We love teaching this unit - with its strong focus on what is happening in the real economy and how it will have effects in the near future - and the students, despite finding the material (eg: we watch "Crude Awakening") a bit heavy, also find it very interesting, and can't help but trying to think up solutions. Sure some of their solutions are a bit naive, but they are kids, and it's great that they've started thinking about how to deal with this issue, as in a few years they'll be dealing with it head on. Whilst I've no doubt that many of them file away the information at the end of class and go off to lunch to be immersed in their adolescent social universe, at least the knowledge of the forces underlying our economic reality are there for later reference.

With regards to how we came to be teaching peak oil, I will say though that at our school we are privileged in a few important ways:

• we're in a public school - so we don't have the puritanical oversight of happy-clappy, god-squadders drilling students about how "the Rapture" is nigh and we'll all be saved as the Earth is destroyed.
• we're in Australia, not the US - so we don't have to deal with the political influence of the zany religious bigots, like the Tea Baggers making it difficult to teach evolution (which isn't contraversial here) let alone climate change (a mandated part of the curriculum in Australia) and peak oil / resource depletion (not mandated yet, but here's hoping).
• we're in a gifted school - so we've got more leeway to work around the mandated curriculum, and try new, more challenging topics.

I mention this because it's easy for us to forget how fortunate we've been, which has been brought home to me whilst reading through the comments of all the obstacles that lay in the path of educators that want to teach the topic of peak oil in high schools. I also want to make the point that when good teachers with up to date knowledge have the freedom to design their own curriculum (as we have had) that it does become possible to teach engaging and relevant topics like peak oil. To other teachers out there wanting to teach about peak oil & resource depletion I say "Don't give up!". I've no doubt it took a fair while to get climate change on the educational agenda, but in most developed countries now, it's taken for granted that this is going to be taught as part of the curriculum - in both secondary and primary school. As educators we have the power to inform dozens (even hundreds) or our next generation about the benefits and pitfalls of this complex society of ours. And this can make the difference between making informed choices and acting hysterically in the face of demanding circumstances.

By teaching students about peak oil, resource depletion and climate change at the very least we are being part of any potential solution, and speaking for myself, that's enough reason to keep teaching it, and teaching it as best I can.

It's not productive to provide very young children with significantly more information than they are ready to process. That said, I've introduced all of my children who are old enough to understand that gasoline doesn't come from the store to both the fact that oil is a finite resource and the concept of peak oil.

In spite of having several children, I have no dog in a fight over public school curricula. My kids are home schoolers. My children know about peak oil because I introduced it to them.

It's important to note that they started with only what I introduced. They're young, and we're still working on basic scientific concepts like the scientific method. I'm trying to teach them that, when confronted with a complex hypothesis like Peak Oil, one of the most important questions to ask is, "How do we know?" The decline of a single oil field is readily explained by conservation of matter, and the kids got that right away. The decline of an economy is less readily explained - and thus far I have not tried. I have no intention of doing so any time soon. My oldest is 9, and that's just not where we're at right now. At this point in their education, trying to give them some kind of crash course in peak oil economics or instill the dread of some arbitrary set of projected consequences will actually detract from teaching them the skills they need to deal with those consequences.

My kids need a very brief sketch of what peak oil is and why that matters, and that's all.

Peak oil is not a fundamental concept, nor is it a skill. Further, some portions of the Peak Oil Story currently fail the "How do we know" test.

I have to vote "Yes". Peak oil should be taught in schools. If we hide this from our children, we deserve destruction. But there is a limit to how much it can help them.

Forget about the public school system successfully teaching Peak Oil concepts. As soon as an individual teacher tries to do so, they will have parents on their back for teaching another ‘myth’.

We decided as a family to home school our four grandchildren because we concluded that the public system is broken beyond repair and many private schools are nothing more than reform schools.

Academic classes were usually completed by noon or earlier and the rest of the day was devoted to wiring our houses, plumbing, laying hard wood floors, repairing farm equipment, raising pigs, cows, and goats etc.

They are at my house every Saturday morning at 7:00 am for breakfast and a lecture on what I consider to be a major life issue. Accordingly, they understand Peak Oil and its implications as well as the regular commenters on TOD and they participate in family preparation activities.

For those who question the value of home schooling, the oldest grandson at twenty three has a very successful career in IT following certification in a number of auto mechanic systems. The second grandson graduates from state university next May with a robotics and nano-technology endorsement. The two youngest are in community college and all have earned their own way - no student debt hanging over their heads.

If you want them to learn about peak oil, invest your own time in teaching them.

As part of Ecology, the topic of human interaction with the environment should also be covered. Students should learn that there at least three types of human use of the environment:
- sustainable uses (more or less), like agriculture, foresty, fisheries, where diligent conservation measures can allow the uses to continue at a high rate for a long time,
- extractive uses, which exhaust the resources (more or less rapidly), like gold or aluminum mining, but where the extracted material can be recycled and reused, and
- extractive uses, which exhaust the resources, like oil drilling and coal mining, and where the extracted material can only be used once.

Otherwise, Ecology tends to be this romantic subject where if only humans did the right things the world would stay preserved in some idyllic state of perpetual abundance.

For extra credit, students should visit mines, quarries, oil wells, etc. whichever are available in the area. A field trip to a mine like the open pits at Hibbing or Butte might be good.

http://www.ironrange.org/attractions/mining/hull-rust/

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/gallery_mines/

The exhaustion of oil fields is less graphic, but they will be prepared to draw their own conclusions.

("The Simpsons" "The PTA Disbands" (1995))
.
[in the school cafeteria]
Mrs. Krabappel: Seymour, you have to think of the children's future.
Seymour: Oh, Edna. We all know that these children HAVE no future.
[everyone stops and stares at Seymour]
Seymour: Prove me wrong, children. Prove me wrong.
_______________________________________________________________________
.
Tell them. They never told us anything of the real world in school. We were all innocence. It was betrayal.
.
Many explorers of the universe, of physics and math, of science, art, and technique, make their major contributions in their early twenties.
British common law age of consent was 12. People had lifespans averaging 30 years before the rise of rational technology. The Quinceañera,
the Bar and Bat Mitzvah, and other rites of passage declare, among other things, the dawn of moral responsibility.
.
We hold our domestic animals in a infantile state. A dog is like a wolf puppy. We do the same to ourselves in civilization. In Mongolia, nomadic three year-olds learn to ride horseback. Five year-olds tend small flocks of sheep. They are allowed to contribute. Some young American children are desperate to learn the real arts of living. It is the brain's wish.
.
I didn't know 49% of americans don't know how long it takes for the earth to revolve around the sun...
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12999
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12999&page=8
Mongolian felt making:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ0uojUHYdA
.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0778454/quotes

I have dabbled in teaching about peak oil and peak minerals for more that 50 years. Overall this has been an interesting but essentially futile hobby. I note that there were close to 100,000 spectators in the Cotton Bowl for the OU-TU football game today. They will find out about peak oil soon enough. I also saw Episode 11 of the Charlie Rose Brain Series on Bloomberg today. The subject was decision making. I presume that it has or will also be played on PBS. Episodes 1 to 10 are available on the internet.

Nevertheless I am enthralled by Gail's posts and the resulting discussions.

http://www.charlierose.com/view/collection/10702

Should the peak oil story be taught in schools?

Nope, because it is the wrong label to focus them on.

There are many 'Peak Oils', and playing pick-the-peak is best left to academic circles.

A MUCH smarter thing to teach them is Finite Affordable Fuel.

That sidesteps the pick-the-peak fluff, and focuses them on thinking about where their energy comes from, and how long it might continue to be available, at affordable prices.

I tutor kids, and I teach them (some of them) to be highly skeptical.

For example, we went over the Steady-State-Economy article in the Oil Drum from Herman Daly, and I explained how economists do the calculations in an example, by comparing two detergents, a biodegradable one with a 2$ cost vs a non-biodegradable one that costs 1$ to manufacture, and 2$ to cleanup the mess.

I explained to him, that according to economists, the non-biodegradable is the better one as it generates more economic activity! He stated that it did not make sense. Yeah, a teenager grasps better the economic system than Nobel prize winners in economy.

Anyway, the cat is out of the bag with the internet, and having solid FACTUAL data (like in this site) definitely beats an alarmist or cavalier site in the web wilderness.

We should teach them things that may help them in the future...

1) Choose an occupation that people with little money will be willing to pay for.
2) Learn to grow food.
3) Eat less meat.
4) Do not waste.
5) Look after your health.
6) Enjoy the simple things in life.
7) Choose a home at least 20m above sea level and close to secure fresh water.
8) Keep some savings as gold.
9) Have no more than 2 children.
10) Vote for people that want to remove the influence of money from government and that believe in balanced budgets.

I'm not sure who it was, but some ignorant asshole above who said "freshmen don't know what happens when a light is switched on" probably doesn't have a clue himself. Actually, the modern education in ECE is heavily geared toward renewable energy systems, biofuels, and anti-FF systems. Furthermore, we should be teaching our children that innovation in the applied sciences is heavily rewarded if successful, starting an engineering firm is the best way to get rich, there is abundance of energy on this planet that is waiting to be collected and used, and that the sooner they get started in an advanced engineering education, the better. High schools should be teaching more physics and math so that we will later have more people in engineering and control studies who are able to design power systems susceptible to wind and solar fluctuations. There is also a severe shortage of nuclear engineers.

I think we should teach all kids about how to grow food, where food comes from and how to cook or preserve it, make cheese, make jam, deal with small live stock like chickens, make pizza in a school food gardens cob oven, let them know food does not only come from the supermarket or out of a box, these are good basic skills that every child should be exposed too, plus it's fun and they learn to respect and eat better quality food. If the world changes for the worst these skills would never be lost.

Australia's Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation is a great example of a working system

http://www.kitchengardenfoundation.org.au/

Baz

In 2002 while discusing spirituality in an online forum someone mentioned oil scarcity. It dragged up a memory of being at school at the age of 7 or 8 (1977/78)and being shown a graph. The graph was of oil, coal and gas quantities over time and showed a steady state until the 90s with then a sudden drop to nothing in the year 2000. Obviously the graph had to be simple for our age but it did hammer home the fact that fossil fuels were a non-renewable resource.

It was after recalling the memory of this graph that I then began to research peak oil and other related energy and environmental issues.

On my mother's side, my ancestors were all of Bavarian origin, but moved to Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great as part of a Russian program to improve agricultural productivity. That lasted until early in the 20th century, when my great grandparents were forced out of Russia due to anti-German sentiment. They settled in the Dakotas. My grandfather was born in North Dakota in 1912 into a very large farming family. He attended grade school, but was pulled out in the third grade because the farm needed more hands. Then came the Depression, and the Dust Bowl caused the farm to fail. By then my grandfather had married, and they sold everything that they had (which wasn't much) and drove to Seattle. With no money and no plan other than to seek help from relatives in the area, they set out to build a new life. As war production ramped up, they found success and proceeded to live a modest but comfortable life.

All of us have hardship in the family tree, and very few of us would have to look farther back than three generations to find it. That's something that I think children are going to understand. Looking to our own history and seeing how real people have dealt with real hardships is going to give us better insight fantasies about stocking up on ammo or playing the commodities markets.

Topics such as life in the Depression are appropriate for young children. They present an opportunity to exercise imagination and connect with their own family history. In the later grades, topics such as financial overleveraging, soil quality, and the rise of fascism are appropriate. From a technical standpoint, peak oil is perhaps too esoteric a topic for elementary or high school, but not the facets that are of greatest concern to most individuals.

Why is it that the subject of peak oil seems to be "in one ear and out the other"? My insight as someone who isn't too far above the college age is that people of my generation, perhaps more so in the past, are used to there being a multiplicity of conflicting ideas. Consequently, we have learned to listen and absorb ideas without necessarily rejecting them, accepting them, or accepting them in the way that the speaker intended. We tend to think that few things are as big a deal as the speaker thinks, perhaps as a result of growing up with sensationalist media, so many hyperboles from religious leaders and politicians, etc.

Gail posed two questions:

If the world will be changing, what should we be saying to our children about it?

The sun and solar system changes very slowly. Basic chemistry, physics, math, anatomy, history, language, reading, safety, hygiene, thrift, and the virtue of making an effort to master something difficult are valid yesterday, today and tomorrow for all children everywhere. Each kid has an unique personality. It's our habit and duty as parents to answer all of our daughter's questions candidly, completely and succinctly. She asks quite a lot of questions, but more importantly often surprises us with knowledge she obtained independently.

In the course of her life, yes, the world will change (war, famine, disaster, geek factor, fashions). All of it will be hers to assess selfishly and personally as she matures and makes mistakes. Our influence as parents will decline rapidly. Her adventure in life is hers to define and pursue by herself of necessity and inalienable constitutional right.

Should the peak oil story be taught in schools?

I don't think it matters. Ecology propaganda is so thick in every primary school, that Peak Everything fits right in. High school and college are places of socialization and career sifting. Does peak oil matter to a dancer, gymnast, musician or artist? Football or basketball players? Doctors and lawyers?

Speaking personally, oil is just a commodity. I would be lying if I told a kid that the financial market is incapable of price discovery or funding worthy new technology. My father lived his entire life without computers, which he understood to be enormous machines made by IBM that used punch cards.

They say it is much harder to be poor after being rich, than simply having been poor all one's life. In that same vein, it would seem that is will be much harder to be without tech toys and the complexity that provides the majority of people a non-labor life, than to have never had those luxuries. Incrementally over the years each subsequent generation has had to do less labor and possess less skills. It will be such a difficult transition to make for the younger generation to do simple things like saw a piece of wood or hand crank a drill bit. The grandparents will be explaining how to do things, the parents will be showing the young ones by example and the young ones will struggle to do what use to be simple physical tasks.

I remember seeing a special on PBS in which an american girl about 20 yrs of age was in a South American country. The local girl about the same age needed to get water from the river and supervised the american girl to help out for the water she would need for the day as well. All of this at 5 am. The American girl complained and spilled her water, and so on. It was really hard to watch. But imagine that scene played out everywhere. It will be such an embarrassing hard scene to watch as the transition takes place from non-labor to laborious lives.

Teach them what is coming? How can you get across what they cannot even come close to imagining? Might as well just let it play out as it occurs. No amount of talk with change what's going to happen and they won't be any better prepared. "Yeah, you told me post peak oil labor was coming, but what are these water bubbles on my hands?!" Those are water blisters. "Oh my God, this is awful, moan, groan, cry."

When I was a kid, people crying on TV was almost unheard of. You were suppose to buck up and take it. Now people cry over the super tiniest things. Ever watch Project Runway? Last week I think everyone on that show cried at least once. People will need to toughen up again, but I'm sure a lot of that will take place during the many stages of collapse.

Also imagine a world with no prescription drugs. Oh my! So many people take a slew of drugs and once there gone what happens then? We'll have to learn to work with our hands, sweat & toil, buck up, no driving, live without texting-emailing-googling-channelsurfing-cellphoning-tweeting, adjust to no prescription drugs, and lose weight on a mass scale due to a lack of melted cheese and deep fried foods. Are you ready for the transition? No, no one is and no amount of talk will that change that.

I remember being taught about peak oil and gas, or rather oil and natural gas depletion in school in Norway. We were told that we had about 50 years left of oil and 200 of gas left in the north sea (now 10 years ago). This was in junior high (14-16 years). My own reaction, and likely everyone else's, was that 50 years ahead is a very distant future. Also, there was no reflection over when the peak would occur or what implications it might have. It was simply assumed that there is no problem until it's empty. The global problem of peak oil was never mentioned as far as I remember, but if it were, I think the reaction would have been the same.

Say we teach young teenagers about peak oil. I think most of them won't understand how serious and immediate the problem is, but they will at least be aware that it exists, and when later they learn to think for themselves, maybe they will understand.

I used to teach material related to this website, but I don't anymore.

I had a writing project which was ostensibly about using materials from multiple sources in a paper, with the topic being the future of oil. I was the only professor teaching this material at the whole school (as far as I know; I'm not in earth sciences).

If there's no support from faculty in other departments, then it's a waste of time. You might as well teach creationism.

I showed my niece and her girlfriend some films about peak oil and got them very interested in the topic. Then her "environmental sciences" teacher told her peak oil was "unscientific."

And so it goes.

I think that high school should focus on setting the foundations for logical thinking and information processing, but mind bending and content has to come at college when more have the capacity for abstract thought. The Advanced Placement Environmental Science curriculum in the hands of even a moderately enthusiastic teacher raises awareness about many issues behind Peak Oil. Of course it is not offered everywhere in US schools, and then only to the solidly college bound. But all students in my freshmen energy classes on Peak Oil at a good state university who took APES in high school know the foundations and are receptive if initially skeptical to the PO message. They may not understand the deep linkage between PO and climate change, but they have been introduced to both and many are sponges for data that they can spread to friends; some have visited their high schools to spread the word.

That background allows me to spend the semester picking apart the issues and uncertainties in timing both, and to help them in seminar format to develop the logical structure in Rationale logical reasoning software and the myriad impacts on BAU. I don't pull punches, I admit that we Boomers (their parents) screwed them over to give them a coddled childhood. Next week I'll be asking them to read Michael Kinsley's Atlantic article on what Boomers can do to redeem our legacy (pay down the debt). I tell them that opportunities for major contributions are there if they understand the basic energy/overshoot problem, align at least a bit of their education toward the new path if only as a hedge, and avoid debt traps. They must remain optimistic because they are young.

I leave most elaboration of the social aspects of PO to others because my course is billed as quantitative intensive, a category that all students must satisfy to graduate. With cajoling they will grudgingly calculate using MacKay's Sustainable Energy Without Hot Air book as basis. They seem to respect the message when it is framed not in doomer-tongue (which I avoid, too much teenage angst already) and they have done the numbers themselves.

Of course, the main problem is that at any time we have only one or two courses on PO underway to interface with less than 1% of undergrads, with more noise on campus about "sustainable business" whatever that is. A dozen of us working to get energy issues into a university-wide multidisciplinary curriculum along the lines of MIT and Berkeley have encountered tone deaf administrators and obstructive empire builders. It doesn't help to be rooted in physics that the average undergrad is not going to head towards because of its justified reputation for being esoteric, hard, and dull.

Those who didn't take APES tend to arrive as aspiring business majors, and it's been a challenge to open their mind to the possibility that their corporate path to glory has rather big potholes and will be strewn with even more burning wrecks.

One could do much more of course, but the realities of having to bring in grants and publish in peer reviewed literature and stay within BAU means that PO issues can only be secondary albeit energy can be used to satisfy some teaching. There are too many sharks around even when one is tenured. Still, I have a dozen known undergrad successes over the decade that I've been PO aware, and hopefully many more who got something out of it. Two have progressed elsewhere through PhDs and are working in Germany and Spain on solar R&D for companies with track records on getting products to market in large scale. A couple are finishing advanced degrees in building design and renewable systems elsewhere after a few years of tinkering. A few are thriving in Teach for America. And a couple of our BA and BS are working in DC/VA on policy and for a wind company. Few but not none.

" If the world will be changing, what should we be saying to our children about it? "

If..?

I don't have any children, but "if" , I did, I would tell them to roll with the punches. Adaptation is the key to survival.

I read that some of the posters here are teachers who have tried to approach the topics of peak oil, sustainability,etc with their students. I don't think it's possible to impact somebody with the importance of sustainability without approaching deeper, more fundamental topics. IMHO, until standards of living in a "disposable" society are addressed, ie: how much does it take to make you happy ?, that the concept of sustainability is beyond grasping. People who are intrinsically unhappy will never understand it. Those looking to fill that hole will mindlessly, and endlessly spend and consume, with nary a thought to the consequence. I grew up chopping firewood, chasing goats, fixing fences, etc, with no modern utilities, no TV and no toys. Crummy for a kid, but looking back, I realize exactly how lucky I really was.

Sometimes, just for the experience, I hop on the bus and go to Super Walmart to observe what "normal" people do. What I am reminded of..? ..Grubs. Larvae. Some of them on scooters. I am reminded of a Mad magazine article I read back in the 70's. It was printed in the early 60's , and was a story about, hypothetically, what our civilization would look like in the year 2010. It was not far off from the truth. Mega-stores, massive cars , morbidly obese people on scooters(no lie) whose brains had also atrophied and withered, producing what bears remarkable resemblance to a good portion of today's American society.

Just musing there.

As for you school teachers....I do not envy you. I work mainly as a chef/restaurant consultant, and my teaching methods are a little...different, usually involving sharp objects and hot things, ultimately, I don't have to worry about pissing off somebody's parents.

One thing I can never stress enough to anybody, is that there is a massive difference in a teacher who teaches by rote, and a teacher who recognizes and cultivates the strengths in those they teach. This has a large part to play in sustainability , I see it based in the refinement of the efficiency of the system ,IMO. Example: I take a consulting job for a struggling restaurant, and see that the the food takes an extraordinary amount of time to get out. A good 90% of the time, it's not the employees, it's either how they were taught, or, or the fact that they would do better in a different position/s, but the person leading/teaching them cannot see these things independent of the whole. By working with the employees, developing their strengths in other areas and showing them how important their actions are in the chain, it gives them a better idea of how to sustain their working model, ie " service time ", so that things don't crumble at the first sign of a packed dining room.

They never get it, until they are shown how important their actions are to the whole, and this requires a change in thinking. And if they don't, they get canned. Too bad you guys can't fire students,lol.

I had an interesting experience on the train the other day. I happened to sit down next to a college student who had a copy of Tainter's "Collapse of Complex Societies" in her hands, which she was busy marking up in yellow highlighter.

Needless to say, I had to strike up conversation, and it turns out she was taking a "Sustainability" class at one of the local colleges.

It appears she was stuck on understanding the concept of "The Commons". So I explained it to her. Then, it turns out she had more questions...and so it went to our stop and we got off the train and went our separate ways.

It is one thing to present a topic in a classroom - it is quite another to be able to answer all the questions and make it applicable to an individual student's life.

What's the point if they learn to regurgitate the answers to "What is a Commons ?", "What is Peak Oil ?", without understanding the relevance and the application in real life ?

My point being that you can't just leave this to the classroom and think it is a done deal.

Which brings me to the question - what exactly ARE we trying to teach about Peak Oil ? That it is real ? How to respond? What will life be like ? Most of it we really don't have any answers for.

Education is a process. What we tell our children depends on what they can process and where they are on their own path of growth.

I think that at earlier stages it is perfectly OK to say that we must respect Mother Earth or that God rejoices when we treat Earth with respect, or that we have to treat environment and other species with care; does not matter where you come from philosophically/spiritually...It is a question of making children aware that we are all part of the environment.

A child who believes that gnomes take care of the forest is more likely to be able to receive "serious" environmental message. And a child who sees "environmentally" driven decision making of their parents will be more receptive to the message too.

There are few posts by teachers above, who point that messages from school message do not get internalized. That's because a lot of what we teach at school does not match child/teen's level of development.

Do you remember learning "times" tables?. They do not make sense and children take sometimes years to learn a few dozen verses - because at that age they do not have number sense (and they can't have it because they are too young). But they can have "environment sense" developed at any age and they will be more likely to treat PO (or global warming or whatever else) as their problem or societal problem when they are old enough.

And old enough is when they outgrow their ego-centric and peer-centric perception of the world, which happens some times in college.

We did not seem to have much trouble deciding to teach our children the scam science of AGW. In the past adults that jumped from behind trees and scared children were put in institutions or jail. Now they are awarded the Nobel Prize!

We should take a big chance and try to teach the nation's students something that is NOT PC for a change. Who knows, they might actually learn something about oil, energy conservation and economics in the process.

"Should the peak oil story be taught in schools?"

8 years ago, I started to campaign on peak oil at parent's meetings in the high school of my sons. The Principal at the time allowed it and gave me 5-10 minutes over several sessions for short presentations of the problem. At the end, when asked what to do, I proposed to introduce car-pooling and later car-free days with the objective to test systems how that would work (are there enough footpaths, pedestrian crossings, public transport etc), the fun was over. It was too much and I was advised to continue my campaign on a rather political level.

At another school, the chair woman of the parent's committee did not even allow me to speak because there would be electric cars to solve the problem.

Of course, peak oil should be taught in geography, environmental science and economics. In physics, it would be important to focus on thermodynamics which control the energy profit ratio of alternative fuels as summarized in my earlier post:

Diminishing Returns of Fossil Fuel Energy Invested
http://www.crudeoilpeak.com/?p=909

But until this is established in the respective curricula, the next phase of peak oil will already have taught us a lesson anyway, without a theoretical education at school.

Australia is failing to implement even the simplest solution, namely to use natural gas as alternative fuel:

Where will the natural gas come from for a transition to CNG/LNG as transport fuel?
http://www.crudeoilpeak.com/?p=1902

5 years ago, I had a meeting on peak oil with the Dean of Science of a leading Uni in Sydney. He had also invited a lecturer from the school of petroleum engineering. He listened for half hour to our discussion and at the end asked the petroleum engineer when he thinks peak oil will be and his answer was: "in 5-20 years". The Dean thought that was close enough to take action and tried to motivate departments to take up this topic. He was unsuccessful, up to now.

A discussion of peak oil has many different facets that are applicable lessons for different ages. I believe practical lessons in simple conversation of anything and everything is worthwhile. Wastage is .... well wastage. As we sued to say in relation to the development of ISO standards, it it isn't contributing to the production of value (in some capacity) then that part of the process needs a rethink. Energy in our lives simply flows, changes shape, changes location, but always continues on. Teaching children at appropriate times some of these principles throughout their education would bring the expectations of our future societies more aligned with natural realities of energy flows.

It's not school, but a friend of mine in her mid-50s who has worked in public policy her entire life recently decided that her education had been lacking and asked me for a list of the ten science and/or engineering things that "every educated person should know." I've been working slowly on the list, and am trying to phrase it as "ten science/engineering questions every educated person should be able to answer." Peak oil is on the list, but I want to sneak up on it somewhat.

The current version of the question I have is "Why do we find useful amounts of oil in the places we do?" Once you can answer that, it seems fairly straightforward to bring in peak oil as a consequence: limited number of fields, oil in place versus what you can extract, find the easy stuff first, and the eventual limits on the ability to find and produce more of the stuff. I'm not sure if it's the right question or not. I'm trying to start from something that sounds fairly innocuous, and have the bad news be something that gets discovered, rather than starting from a "the sky is falling" point.

I'm a physics teacher in a high school near Torino, in Italy. Every year I explain problems tied with peak oil and all what is connected to the limits of growth in my classes, where are studying people from 17 to 19 year old. I can say that many of them understand most part of what I tell them, and some try to demonstrate to their relatives that they can do something to change their mind from growth to a almost stationary state. I can remember an old song saying these same things:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlJT8r-7oFo

And you (Can you hear and)
Of tender years (Do you care and)
Can't know the fears (Can you see we)
That your elders grew by (Must be free to)
And so please help (Teach your children)
Them with your youth (You believe and)
They seek the truth (Make a world that)
Before they can die (We can live in)

Teach your parents well
Their children’s hell
Will slowly go by
And feed them on your dreams
The one they pick's
The one you’ll know by.

Teachers need to make Peak Oil concrete, physical.
Kids need to learn how to quantify and convert, then their brains will quickly move on to understand Peak Oil. It's basic arithmetic.

Unfortunately, US education has teachers teaching the textbook(as approved by Texas Board of Ed) or some Washington based test.

How much energy is in a barrel of oil, ton of coal, cubic foot of gas?
How big is a barrel of oil, cu ft. of gas, ton of coal?
How many barrels of oil, cubic feet of gas, tons of coal does the world produce?
Where are oil, gas and coal produced?
How many barrels of oil, cu ft of gas, tons of coal have geologists discovered and when? How much can actually be expected to be used(recovery)?

A couple of classes and a couple of tests should be enough to convince the kids, but the miseducation of children IS the conservative agenda.

Children are also 'protected' from understanding the real world consequences of raging hormones.
Again, conservatives fear the kids may elect to use contraceptives or to get abortions angering an already Angry God, though I doubt God is anywheres nearly as angry as Pat Robertson or Limberger.

Maybe we could start by teaching kids that the earth goes around the sun, and not vice versa. According to National Science Foundation Surveys of Public Understanding of Science and Technology, in 2001 only 75% of U.S. adults knew that fact. In 2005, that percentage dropped to 71%.

I think a few commenters above have got the right idea. Understanding the cause of future world problems might be good for the upper grades or advanced students, but what about the younger students?

I'd teach them basic gardening skills. How to grow food when you can't get it at the store. How to get energy from the sun, both electric energy via PV or heat energy for cooking. How to build and use an electric generator. How to tell good drinking water from bad, and techniques for converting bad water to good water. How about, fishing, foraging, orienteering, woodworking, metal work, mechanical skills, bicycle repair, basic home repair, plumbing, etc.

These are skills kids are not being taught anymore, because we find little use for them in today's world, and yet we all know they will likely become useful again within another generation.

Up post it has been suggested that the subject be taught in elementary school, high school, and college. I favor the High School and College approach and I favor teaching with care, because the boy who cried wolf is not just a story.

The problem is not as simple as identifying a course title and a level within the educational process. As a teacher and a parent, the problem is that the person who teaches the class has a great deal of influence over what message the students receive. Likewise, the text book and the school board have a say.

What values are taught is really what is at issue here. Each family has first dibs on teaching their children values. Then the schools come in and we all would like to have kids learn what facts exist in science and where critical thinking will lead once the kids have the faintest understanding of how to think. And yes, facts need a framework of philosophy in order to be compiled and recalled. In forth grade, the kids don’t think, they trust. This is a fact that schools need to consider. In high school the kids start thinking, but many are not there and thinking with adolescent brains is not the least bit critical, but high school students at least don’t trust everything they hear. I taught in high school because I felt the greatest challenge was to fine tune this idea of critical thinking and elementary school – where the greatest learning takes place—is not where the greatest thinking takes place.

So the issue is simple to me, teach the subject in the science classes that exist to teach the facts. Where there are disagreements in and among the true critical thinkers – teach that as well. Bring the controversy to the students and show them how to access original sources. Show them the internet and theoildrum.com. This would be doing them the most good. BTW, this works for evolution, age of the universe, global climate change, and peak oil. Finally, don’t try to make them see your point of view. Make them see that there are points of view and they need to develop one.

Back in 1977, just after the first oil crisis in the U.S., I was a transportation planner in a major city charged with updating the area's long range transportation plan. One day I got a visit from a high school teacher who was "obsessed" with peak oil. In his words, it was the first thing he thought about in the morning and the last thing at night.

We listened to his concerns and did build into our study a three level scenario of gasoline being (in today's prices) $2.75, $4.60, and $6.88 per gallon. Of course, the elasticities we had available didn't demonstrate the response we saw in 2008, but it was all we had with which to work back then.

I suspected his students just smiled and ignored him, perhaps recalling his warning 20 years later when gas was so cheap and imagining him being wrong. Perhaps one of them sees things differently now and values his teaching. I know I do.

Well, I've taught a seminar in peak oil to high school seniors for several years now. My first question is what they believe keeps the lights on in the room. The course begins by taking Albert Bartlett's lecture as a rough guide; that is, starting out with exponential growth and first applying it to human population. We then begin a new thread into the history of energy transformations and eventually concepts in human ecology with readings from William Catton and Richard Heinberg. Those ideas converge into an historical perspective on petroleum consumption and ends with the Oil Drum's analysis of the IEA 2008 Report. Students write independent research papers, which have included Hubbert linearizations, an introduction to biophysical economics, and attempts to collect realistic supply data for natural gas, uranium, coal, and other non-renewable resources. Other papers turn out to be crappy "reports" on alternative energies. A favorite exercise is "That Cubic Mile" where attempts are made to calculate and replace the annual energy of combustion of gasoline with electrical energy provided by some other means. Along the way we watch "The End of Suburbia," "The Crash Course," "Crude Impact" and so on.

Reaction is all over the place. My "biophysical economist" is a serious doomer and now a college freshman intent to study geophysics (His father is a geophysicist for a major oil company). In fact many of the parents are employed all over the oil and financial industry. We have had many guest lectures, including Heinberg who gave an evening lecture that was attended by many illuminaries in the community, in part because we are a leading private school in our city.

Some knowledgeable faculty take a keen interest, whereas another good proportion think I'm a bit of a nut case. Faculty with newborn generally avoid me altogether. Still, my course is both tolerated and advertised within the school community.

I would say that the course has been eye opening for many and largely disturbing. A few students are obviously influenced and may be one factor affecting certain life choices, and we do spend some time talking about careers. I would say that most seem to comprehend the problem, but in spite of great intellect, kids at that age are living in the moment, they are still mostly concerned about relationships, searching for self-identity, and getting into college (or the right college). Many just seem to be partying on until the party's over. Maybe I'm not that much different.

First show them this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY

Now, let us talk about teaching humility. I presume since they are getting to go to school instead of beginning hard manual labor at a pre-teen age, they know they are the elite of the human population, blessed with choices even their grandparents could have only dreamed of. They do know this don't they? If not, why not?

Now, have them look at the population, the population growth of India and China, the massive move forward in education and development in 2/5 (two fifths) of the world population, the number of educated competitors, consumers, artists, technicians, aspiring entertainers, aspiring hookers, aspiring architects, aspiring sports stars beginning to flood the market, ALL HUNGRY. Hungry for what? For EVERYTHING. Remind your students that these people are mostly young, competitive, educated, and risk takers, and do NOT take no for an answer easily.

Remind your young students that the citizens of Japan, Europe, and the U.S., are an elite aging minority setting like foam on the raging sea of the young sea of the most rapidly growing upwardly mobile population in the history of all known humanity, linked together into a web of information sharing undreamed of only 2 decades ago.

Everything I have said above is FACTS now, facts on the ground. Demographics is the most ruthless of the statistics, once set in motion they can be used to predict the future for the upcoming century.

Now for the controversial part: Should we remind our hopefully now humbled children that their influence in the world, the importance of their decisions regarding what they buy, what they drive, what they release in carbon, what they consume, is becoming almost miniscule in comparison to what the sea of upwardly mobile young from all over the world decides is important. Only by the sheer force of intellect and will and applied knowledge can they hope to avoid being washed over board, not in the storm of the century, but in the storm of the millennium. Have these students read the book of the age, "Future Shock" by Alvin Toffler, and pay attention to the chapters "The 800th Lifetime" and the ideas regarding the "Accelerative Engine". Remind them that the massive consumption, massive increase in information, and massive change Toffler discussed was already underway before the age of the home computer and the internet. Remind them that what Toffler predicted has since been dwarfed by reality.

Energy? It will be just one tiny aspect of the massive waves already striking at the very nature and survival of the former Western power elites, and in fact at the very survival of the modern culture as we know it.

Last lesson: Whatever change they can possibly envision will be WRONG. Whatever they think they know about anything...art, science, communication, technology, energy, social and community structure, is already becoming obsolete. They will deal with industries not yet born, organizational structures not yet known, and products not even yet on the drawing board. Think of the internet and computer times 10, and the fall of the Soviet Union (I know, the students will never have heard of it) times 5.

Now ask the students: Are you ready? Can anyone be ready? Oh, one more thing...if you can get this clas approved somewhere, I will teach it for barely more than minimum wage and a health plan...I know of and work with firms that consider themselves the cutting edge of technology but are actually so primitive it causes laughter and derision even amoung their under-educated youthful employees...these firms actually think they are ready and modern.

Roger Conner
RC

Great topic. This is more fundamental than teaching PO or when to teach PO to children. PO is a symptom but it is not the disease. The real issue is about changing our school curricula and dogmatic approach to education to adapt to the coming challenges of living after the oil is gone. We simply must start NOW to reprogram into our educators and children that college will not necessarily be the best long term objective of completing a primary K-12 education. We will need welders, plumbers, electricians and lots of mechanics in addition to civil engineers, food scientists and agricultural engineers. We need people who will be good building and assembling things - NOT more economists, lawyers and wall street bankers!

The only way to do this is to start now at the earliest age teaching children about how to survive in a post-oil world. Children born in 2010 will never get to drive a gas auto unless they have access to an antique and can pay $20 per gallon for fuel. They will need a firm grasp on agriculture, food production, mechanics and photovoltaic/electronics to name a few. If our education system does not reprogram itself immediately - it will be preparing more kids for college and there will be a complete failure to prepare high school graduates for the year 2030. There will be massive unemployment and a skill shortage the likes of which our world has never seen.

We have 20 years to rewrite the whole system.

Act now....it is already too late.

Gail,
when my son and daughter in law expected their kid no 2 last year, I suggestet that - if a boy, call him Sue. That will make him tough: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1BJfDvSITY. It was a girl (they wanted it to be a surpise the second time around), and she seems to be tough enough already.

Seriously, I think the best way to prepare our kids is to make them love and respect nature, and to thrive in it. Also demonstrate the growing of vegetables and teach them (and their parents) practical skills and how to reduce waste. In short, ordinary boy/girl scout skills.

Bringing up the issue of Peak Oil is besides the point during childhood years, I think. It is the basic attitude to the challenges we as adults see coming that need to be in place.

I've been asking a similar question for a long time: Why are such interrelated topics so essential to the long term economic health of civilization as Peak Oil, continued exponential population growth, resource demand growth, and myriad other topics pertaining to human ecology and natural limits... Why are these subjects not being seriously considered in the context of higher education? At colleges and universities? So far as I am aware, serious discussion of challenges relating to our energy future have not even garnered exposure by way of unofficial events, such as hosting panel discussions or guest lecturers. Colleges and universities seem to be as much in denial or ignorance of these essential topics and their related challenges as the general populace. So far the only informed discussion I've witnessed regarding our energy future on the UT Campus, for example, has been among Engineering students outside of the classroom, during a picnic. Not that I would expect Business or Economics programs to begin examining the implications of continuous economic growth and population growth in the face of resource limits given a time constant longer than say, a few years... :-P Just some informal dialog and exposition of the topic would be encouraging, but I don't see any leadership in that regard... yet.

Elementary school kids? I don't know, but Jr. High and High School students should definitely be exposed to basic concepts such as ecology, natural limits, carrying capacity, qualitative vs. quantitative growth, and especially the fact that human economies are a subset of, and therefore entirely dependent on nature.

"There is enough hydrogen in the universe to power the universe!" ;-)

I think that as soon as you are thinking of teaching particular content to a student, that implies that you have a vested interest in the result. I also think kids are smart enough to realize this, and react to it. People have been arguing about what should be the content for as long as there has been public education, and for just as long kids have known that education isn't really for them but for all these other somebodies who have these agendas, and they have tended to resist it. I say that if you trust your kids to know what they want to do, then supporting them in their efforts is all that is necessary. They will learn what they want and need to know to accomplish what they want to do.

I think that deciding that all the people taking those "squishy subjects" like English and art should be sent to the trade schools and so on is silly, saying they are "unemployable" in the coming times when they are going to be just as necessary. I think everyone is going to have to be a generalist to some degree, doing food production and then something else as well to make them valuable to the community. But that other valuable thing could be music, or writing the new stories that illustrate our new situations, and make the new myths that move us in the new directions that we need to be going in. I think if all we have are welders or electricians, or people who can integrate around a pacman contour, then life will be not worth living for those who are left.

People have had this idea that "knowledge" is this thing that is transmitted from the authorities to those who are deserving of it, and along with that transmitted knowledge is the idea that any knowledge outside of it is suspect and not to be tolerated. But what is true is that all the stuff in our heads is way different from the next guy's stuff, and we have to work very hard if we want to know that the next guy understands anything close to what we mean when we are talking to him. We have lots of shorthand tricks to facilitate our communications, but if we want to really communicate, then we have to go beyond those tricks, or at least be able to realize we really can't know what the other guy gets from what we say. So "knowledge" really doesn't stick around long enough to be "transmitted".

I think that, from having my own kids, the things that we "teach" to kids overtly are drowned out by the behaviors we present to them. You can post up all kinds of signs in the school halls that say "respect!", but if you don't listen to what children have to say then they know that you don't trust or respect them, and that it is all a lie. Lying to kids is about the worst thing you can do.

I think that "answering all their questions" is not really important to do. What they need to learn is that they can find answers to their own questions. You can show them ways that you have found helpful to you to answer your own questions. "I have found that for me, this a helpful way to look at these kinds of questions." you could say. Giving them your answers is not a good idea, and forcing them to use your ways of finding answers is not helpful to them. You may not know what their question really is, or why they are asking it, after all. Acting like you have no questions isn't helpful either.

So, parents making changes in their own lives because of peak oil, and then explaining why when they are questioned about it, is about the best education kids can get. As soon as it becomes "knowledge" packaged to be "transmitted" at school, kids will disregard it as being not relevant to them, and just like all that other stuff foisted off on them that doesn't address what is important to then personally.

Realistically, and I am thinking of world-wide education here, a first step, before any others, is teaching children (6 to 14 say) the TOOLS they need to develop, acquire world knowledge, sophistication, if I may call it that, as well as becoming manipulators and creators of knowledge, ideas, artifacts, ways of doing, etc.

Namely, reading and writing. This is really easy and cheap - provided basic conditions such as children actually attending school, having an incentive to learn (r and r must be seen as having some functionality), etc. are met. Added on, other types of representations, pictorial, graphic, iconic or abstract representations such as numbers, maps, graphs, currencies. In the OECD, many will learn basic r and r of natural language on their own / w parent / by osmosis/ thru the TV, it is that easy.

Mathematics. What to put in a basic maths educational curriculum will vary, but it is actually one of the topics that educators world-wide pretty much agree on. Visit a 3rd grade class in Argentina, Switzerland, Nepal, and Japan, and the content will not be too different. Teaching methods, class management, cultural ambiance, etc. will vary greatly, and there are hot debates about these. Personally, I would include logic (propositional logic at least, if not more) under the ‘maths’ rubric, as the entire field should be labelled logico-mathematics. Children, or teens or adults for that matter, will not learn math on their own or at home (barring exceptional circumstances) and it is the one core topic that Gvmts. / communities must address, using expert knowledge for cultural transmission, which implies some societal planning, e.g. teacher training, schools with a schedule, etc.

This topic is of course related to the ‘representational’ topic as numeracy (a code word for some math understanding), is mediated, always, through symbols that represent concepts (think of zero and place value as a numeral, it is not a cardinal/ordinal number but something else), math is purely abstract and constructed through the relationships between symbols. Which does not mean that human beings have no ‘innate’ - inherent, wired-in - apprehension of length, time, weights, relations between quantities/numerosties, however defined, but simply that they must, to discuss or manipulate these, work out general laws, acquire a conventional language. Nor does it mean that ‘maths’ is disembodied and unrelated to the real world, a sort of useless academic exercise. Of course, all this is based on a pov which stipulates that ‘math’ (and logic) is universal and has a quality of ‘truth’ in the system in which it defines itself.

Science. What is basic science rapidly slips into cultural, economic, territory... So its harder.

What parts of it should be understood at what age? Science curricula are dominated by a pov that spells basics first - but what are that basics of Biology for ex? Botany, in the sense of identifying and classifying nearby plants, understanding photosynthesis (chemistry) or the functioning of the cell or population growth since 1950, or electricity ;) ? Science teaching is also subject to functional criteria - we slip away from TOOLS to the functionality of knowledge, the economy, available jobs, brain drains, educational policy, etc. Some say an agreement is essential, others claim that diversity is a source of creativity, innovation, etc.

In the US, some districts balk at teaching Evolution, don’t, or only teach it as a possible theory, whatever. In Cuba, it is taught that the US moon landings are a hoax, and the technology is reviewed and dismissed (I have read.) The Philippines deliberately trains workers for export in the health / help for humans field. US corporations often prefer outsourced or imported labor for low level ‘scientific jobs’ and have tailored their policies to that, in function mostly of economic criteria and the tax structure. Switzerland imports nurses and doctors, and so on. Mostly, what is going on is that an elite or lower educated worker class is trained in function of certain ‘opportunities’ and basic science is woefully neglected in the ‘lower grades’ or for the population in general. (There is a reason for that.) Science, pure but mostly applied, if I may shoddily use this fuzzy distinction, is a money-maker, and the common good tends to be eclipsed by economic policies, fame and fortune for the few, national kudos, and so on.

In this landscape, teaching or informing about peak oil, or more generally, fixed or limited stocks and their inevitable depletion over time, becomes a political and ideological, nationalistic issue. Outside of the scope of TOOLS, which should be the no. 1 priority.

All the rest. Includes history, geography, etc.

Gail's choice of titles caught my attention, I have been lurking on the Deep Water Thread where things are calming down a bit and was curious what else was on TOD. Obviously, by it's name Oil and Hence Peak Oil is of huge interest to this community. But for me the answer to the question is teaching about Global Warming and the current and eventual consequences. The contribution to CO2 emissions from Transportation (oil) is substantially less (32B pounds CO2/yr) than the other 3 sectors; industrial, commercial & residential; where Electricity is the major contributor. (DOE annual energy report) Aspects of GW can and should be taught at all levels as a root course, but the impending impacts of GW, which the majority choose either to deny or ignore, are mind boggling. If I lived in New Orleans I think I would have a panic attack each and every night on the subject. Here in the North, where I live, a main line newspaper did a valid survey of the number of people who believed in GW. The results an astounding 59% of the people surveyed thought GW was bogus. I have been working in the GW area now for a bit over half a decade and what I've learned, most importantly about the impending results, and I've only scratched the surface, leaves me incredulous. And by the way in my view we will need petrol to fuel transportation into the far distant future, but we need to conserve it's use. Moving personal transportation from Oil to other forms of energy helps the oil picture but does not greatly impact the CO2 picture. Moving goods transportation from trucks to trains reduces the consumption of oil by a rough factor of 4. Ships and Planes not much alternative

Probably the most severe end result is going to be rising ocean levels, now rising at pretty low levels, ~3mm/yr over the last 80 but increasing annually. For those that believe in GW there is a pervasive understanding that if we simply cut emissions to the natural take-up levels that all will be better and the Earth will be saved. This view is far from the actual. Susan Solomon et al, from NOAA/NASA, published a paper in Nov. 2008 titled "Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions." The authors make the case that even if emissions were stopped entirely that after a thousand years the levels would still be elevated i.e. there would only be slight diminishment, ~20% over a thousand years, and consequently world temps would stay elevated.

Today world Ice and Snow packs are melting at ever increasing rates. The maintenance of the higher temps guarantees that the melt will continue and ICE Amplification (Currently referred to as Arctic Amplification) will continue to increase increasing the melt rate even if the temp rise is stopped and just holds close to steady. The Arctic Melt, this year came within about 2.5% of breaking the 2007 melt extent record of ~40%. This year for the first time in 150k years both the NE and NW passages were open for shipping and a few companies were using the passages. Projections for total melt range from 2013 (a bit too aggressive for me)to 2050 (far to conservative for me. Projecting the mean min. extent line (NSIDC Arctic info site, NASA supported)would point to ~2030. but the last 6 years min. extent have all been on or below the average and that trajectory would tend to point to ~2020 or earlier. After the Arctic (about 1.5 feet ocean rise, ice in the pond), comes Greenland (~21 feet rise, ice on a rock) and later but continuously is Antarctica (~240 feet rise, ice both in the pond and on a rock). Yes, the current projections, all based on a linear and non-accelerated model, point to rises a long way off, so why worry! Right? Solomon et al, calls the melt irrevocable, and inevitable. Consider this if ONLY the Arctic and 20% of Greenland melt the rise is over 6 feet. Something like 60 Million US citizens live in the 0 to 6 foot land zone. Big bucks to move them. Since I live above the maximum high water mark, I can choose not to have a house on giant stilts. If all three major Ocean located Ice masses the Ocean would only come up the Mississippi as far as New Madrid, Missouri. See No worry! For me!

But to reverse this course seems to require reversing atmospheric content levels or the ppm levels. In other words sucking CO2 (and most likely methane) out of the atmosphere to the levels of ~1800 so that World Temps retreat to levels of the same time. That will solve part of the problem but it is a gigantic problem, and lifetime employment for lots of folk. But unfortunately, it will only slow the ice melt not stop the melt. Remember Ice or Arctic Amplification? Conversion of Ice fields to open water or land causes more and more of the Sun's energy to be collected, hence the word "acceleration", and it is fairly independent of temperature. And don't forget all of the land based Snow and Ice fields are also undergoing an accelerating melt. We get to see this reenactment up north every spring, on a local, back yard, basis. I assert it is going to take the development of some incredible techniques to selectively lower some regional (the Arctic has the same area as the 48 states) temps such that the ice refreezes and regrows, and the balance is restored. And no, higher levees, and sea walls and sea gates etc is not going to solve the problem.

So I would submit that GW and educating the kids at a rapid rate on the incredible far reaching consequences of GW is a very very high priority. We really don't have a lot of time before we are going to see the shore line consequences, and it is essential to teach this field to the oncoming younger generation.

A long Rant over. Duck

I have taught my children about Peak Oil.

They fully understand the situation, and are now in their 20s.

The effect of their awareness?

Nil at this stage.

I suppose however that if/when PO turns out to be a reality then they won't go into shock.

I suspect that they know that they will have to abandon the cities and return to the security of a rural community ... or perhaps not.

I think we should be teaching our children how to be healthier and live stress free lives. That will lead to better decisions, especially concerning energy expenditures and ventures. A working solution for energy sources would be a good stress reducer for everyone.

In my school district the Superintendent is eagerly pursuing a conversion to the "21st Century School" model which has gained popularity in Texas. Basically, the hope is that transforming high schools to mimic the corporate world will draw MNC's to our community searching for more competitive human resources. The superintendent spends every summer going to corporate sponsored junkets that insist to local administrators the future of education lies in an unending global economic expansion. As a believer of PO (whether in the short or long term) this whole vision of education as being a viable future for education makes me want to pull my hair out.